GUEST OVERVIEW: Tessa Lena is a strongly opinionated musician, writer, and philosopher living in New York. She is a classically trained pianist and singer, born and raised in Moscow. As a teenager, Tessa had the honor of performing her own composition at the Moscow Conservatory and wanted to be a geneticist. As her interests expanded to Tibetan music and language, she headed to Lhasa with a backpack to do ethnomusicology research. After being attacked by a sex trafficker in Tibet and successfully fighting him off, Tessa settled in Chicago where she started a band working with her hero Ian McDonald (of King Crimson and Foreigner) and drummer Alan Lake (who has played and recorded with Madonna, Brian Ferry, Julian Lennon, Ministry, Brian Wilson and Sam Moore from Sam And Dave). After a few years in Chicago, Tessa moved to New York and started a new band, TESSA MAKES LOVE, along with occasional collaborations by Ian McDonald. In 2016, Tessa started Coalition for Artistic Dignity and organized a conference in Brooklyn dedicated to artistic dignity, social power and corporate responsibility. In early 2017, she released an album titled ‘Tessa Fights Robots’ - which is also the name of her Substack blog; both the album and the blog are "about being human in the world of technology, big data, and machine-like people." https://www.tessamakeslove.com/ https://tessa.substack.com/

X/Twitter: @TessaMakesLove